A Free Left Blog

What is society? It isn’t a thing or an object like other things or objects are. In that sense, Margaret Thatcher was broadly right in saying: “There is no such thing as society”. But we do use the word widely to refer to an ‘it’ – society – so though we cannot pin it down in the physical real world, society undoubtedly has a reality in consciousness, for us. We might for example think of it as a ‘subjective object’, albeit something which is not so much thought as felt. The philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote directly about society as far as I am aware, but his reflections on the nature of ‘being’ – of human beings and other beings, including the inanimate objects of our world – show how we are each connected into the world of other people and objects. As such he sketches out how what we might call the architecture or internal wiring of society works, and thereby provides us with a powerful way of conceiving what it is that makes ‘us’ us. One of the few examples He...

(Part IV on Popper and contemporary ideologies ) The avoidance and attempted suppression of contradictory arguments and evidence is a typical feature of ideologies. This tendency is also a natural feature of everyday politics of course. Practically, it is worth tolerating – though with an awareness that to tolerate something is to dislike it. However, when we are talking about matters of truth and right, and attempts to control what is said based on exclusive authority, reserved for certain groups or people, it is a different matter. This is where authoritarianism still raises its ugly head in our supposedly liberal Western societies - including from supposedly liberal people. As Karl Popper said in ‘ On the Sources of Knowledge and Of Ignorance ’ , a lecture given in 1960: “ The question of the sources of our knowledge, like so many authoritarian questions, is a genetic one. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may legitimize its...

The philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. He was a member of the party from 1 st May 1933, ten days after becoming Rector of Freiburg University and three months after the Nazis took power in Germany, to the end of World War II. This is problematic for the likes of me who have been profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s writings and find beautiful, even magical, insights in them. (For me, reading Division I of Being and Time , though slow and painstaking, was like turning a light on to the world as it really is.) Recently, with his so-called ‘ black notebooks’ apparently revealing deeper anti-Semitism than was previously thought, attacks on Heidegger and his philosophy for being Nazi have reached a crescendo. The Guardian for example published this article , entitled: ‘ Heidegger's 'black notebooks' reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy ’. That piece and, it seems, the notebooks themselves, reveal nothing of the sort – though to begin with it is ...